Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/866

844 the cardinal principles of religion may well be evoked; but insist that definite answers must be found to these transscendent questions, and that there is just one authorized way of arriving at such answers, and you provoke revolt. The only result, therefore, of Emperor William's scheme, could it be realized, would be to fill the German fatherland with intellectual stagnation, formalism, and hypocrisy. Such, too, would be the effect here if the faint-hearts of the religious world could have their way. They would intrust the inculcation of religious truths to the public-school teachers, and would place religion on a par with geography, with this difference in favor of geography that it could prove all its statements by irrefragable evidence, while religion, though taught with an equal air of authority, could not in any similar manner prove its statements. Truly, the friends of a cause are often its greatest enemies, while those who get the credit of being its enemies are often its truest friends.

That the American people will not hand over their religion to the state to be sterilized in the public schools is now a matter of certainty, and it will be a very bad sign if anything of this kind happens in Germany. We can imagine a cynical enemy of all religion aiding and abetting the emperor's scheme, in the confident expectation that it would do more in ten years to extinguish vital religion in the German Empire than all the attacks of all the freethinkers could do in a century. We could imagine, too, that people with whom religion was a mere fashion or social badge might favor it as tending to attach a stigma to independent thought; but we can not imagine sincerely and intelligently religious people lending it any countenance. If the religious clauses of the present German education bill become law, it will be a clear sign that, to all intents and purposes, religion is dead in Germany.

disease at one front of battle is ever yielding to the advances of medical skill, at another it is as surely surrendering to the progress of hygiene. To-day the physician is asked not only how the sick may be healed, but how the well may stay well. From year to year investigation lengthens the list of diseases strictly preventable, and diphtheria and typhoid only linger to mark the neglect of well-understood precautions. Vaccination has been so striking an example of what prophylaxis can do, that hundreds of eager experimenters are endeavoring to bring consumption and scarlet fever into the same category as small-pox. From maladies less serious, but much more common, the public is fast learning that immunity is largely a question of taking care of one's general health and vigor. Seeds of disease which find a foothold in an enfeebled frame are either repelled by a sound and hearty constitution or harmlessly digested by it. To maintain this happy condition wholesome food, abundant exercise, personal cleanliness, temperance in all things, and the avoidance of worry are indispensable.

There are a good many people who know their lung-tissues to be delicate, or their heart-action to be irregular, or who suffer from some other constitutional weakness. Among this class the custom is gradually spreading of consulting a physician, not when acute difficulty has arisen, but as soon as the infirmity is detected, and periodically thereafter. Not seldom health is maintained in this way and life lengthened, for it is in their early stages of development that many diseases, especially the obscure derangements of the nervous system, can be most successfully treated. Perhaps it is the daily glass of spirits, or the weekly supper party, which the physician interdicts. Quite as often it is the allurement of the stock exchange or the card-table which he has to